Part VI -- Dean Henderson: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf. Chapter 6: Leaving The Arabs Holding The Bag

Leaving The Arabs Holding The Bag

Posted on 12/02/2016 | 7 Comments

(Excerpted from Chapter 6: BCCI: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)

When Sheik Kamal Adham was indicted for his role in the BCCI spook house, he referred to the bank’s closure as a conspiracy by Western bankers bent on keeping the Arab world out of the game of international finance. 

Speaking to a pan-Arab conference in Cairo, Egypt in 1992, Adham stated angrily, “This bank (BCCI) is not any bank.  It is a bank that owns 66 banks around the world…  This is not much appreciated by the big powers, who were somehow like the guardians to the younger students in school.  They…used to monitor what the Third World used to do…  Suddenly a new vehicle appeared on the scene which belonged to the Third World, instead of using the vehicle they usually assigned to us, (the Third World) have their own vehicle now so the money that came from the oil business went to this vehicle instead of to the banks of the Western world…  If you look around in the banking world, you will see that most of the Arab banking organizations with international branches are being hit one after the other, and it cannot appear coincidental.  I believe some of it is intentionally done because the New World Order does not allow anyone to have his own vehicles.”

When the Bank of England moved in to shut down BCCI in 1991 Adham wasn’t the only Arab leader crying foul.  One Pakistani official from Sind Province stated, “The West and Israel were responsible for the closing of the bank.  BCCI was a Third World bank, and it took the challenge of breaking the hegemonic control of the Jewish Lobby and the world’s financial institutions.”  The way BCCI was shut down merely bolsters these claims.

In July 1991 Bank of England Governor Robin Leigh-Pemberton successfully solicited an $8 million cash infusion into BCCI from Sheik Zayed- BCCI’s biggest shareholder.  The very next day, the Bank of England ordered regulators around the world to shut BCCI down.  N. M. Rothschild & Sons, which owns a big chunk of the Bank of England and another big chunk of Bank of America, is also cozy with al-Nahayan’s Abu Dhabi Investment Fund.  The London bank had been at the heart of the BCCI scandal.  Before British investigators could move in, a warehouse full of BCCI documents in London mysteriously burned to the ground.

In the months before the closure, Sheik Zayed had begun pumping millions into BCCI.  He had done so on the advice of his US real estate investment lawyer Sandy Martin.  Martin was a former National Security Adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Within months of the BCCI shutdown, Martin hung his client out to dry.  He walked into the office of the Federal Reserve Board’s general counsel with a list of Zayed’s alleged improprieties.  Sheik Zayed’s personal income was around $30 billion/year and a good bit of that was going into shady US real estate being handled by Martin.

Zayed had risen to power in Abu Dhabi in 1966 when the British helped him overthrow his brother Sheik Shakbut, who had refused British demands that he spend his oil revenues on development schemes.  Zayed, under British tutelage, immediately launched the Abu Dhabi Investment Fund to serve as a vessel through which oil revenues could be recycled into ventures more favorable to the British Crown.  It now appeared as though the puppeteer was squeezing a little extra from his faithful old friend.  US Ambassador to the UAE Ned Walker refused to discuss the situation.

The Federal Reserve claims it tried to get audits on BCCI for some time, but that neither the Bank of England nor BCCI auditor Price Waterhouse would turn over the papers.  New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau ran into similar roadblocks in his investigation of BCCI.  Finally, the Federal Reserve sent a SWAT team into Price Waterhouse.  They found that Price, one of the Big Five US accounting firms, had given BCCI an unqualified audit for years 1985-89, despite the fact that Price knew BCCI had no capital.  Later it was revealed that Price Waterhouse had received $600,000 in loans from BCCI’s Barbados office and had never repaid them. [247]  The Bank of England and Price Waterhouse were clearly engaged in a cover-up.

Officials at the CIA, NSC, FBI and the Justice Department would soon join in the BCCI whitewashing effort.  Morgenthau said Justice was telling potential witnesses not to cooperate with him, while withholding documents which his office requested.  Reagan Treasury Secretaries James Baker and Donald Regan had been tipped off about BCCI in 1985 and did nothing.  This was around the same time Baker was selling his Texas Commerce Bank Tower to BCCI shareholder Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz at a hugely inflated price.  A Senate committee charged with investigating BCCI was chaired by Sen. John Kerry (D-MA). Kerry helped put a lid on the CIA role in contra drug trafficking.  Kerry is part of the Eastern Establishment whose forefathers became rich smuggling Chinese opium.  Kerry is a member of the Yale Skull & Bones secret society, where he and George Bush learned to recite cryptic incantations and to keep a good secret.

In 1988 Robert Gates, then-Deputy Director of CIA, wrote a six-page report titled, BCCI: Bank of Crooks & Criminals.  Director Casey shrugged off the report.  The NSC received reports of BCCI brokering nuclear technology to Iran, Iraq and Libya, yet did nothing.  In 1987 the FBI requested records pertaining to BCCI’s role in the Iran/Contra affair, then did nothing.  Even after Sheik Zayed and other BCCI officials pleaded guilty to money laundering in Florida, the Justice Department pressured Florida Comptroller Gerald Lewis to keep BCCI open.

When the Bank of England closed BCCI a little-known list of US Congressmen who had taken bribes from the bank was made public for only 30 days.  According to Chicago BCCI researcher Sherman Skolnick, on the list were the names of 108 members of the US House and 28 members of the US Senate.  The most important Congressman to BCCI had been House Ways & Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-IL), who was later forced to resign and served jail time on corruption charges.

Rostenkowski was a large shareholder in Garfield Ridge Trust & Savings Bank, a Chicago-based S&L, which disguised Mena, AR drug money laundering as soybean and currency trades on Chicago’s Commodity Futures Trading Exchange (CFTE), where Capcom and Enron hid their tracks.  Wendy Gramm, wife of Senate Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm (R-TX), was a key regulator at the CFTE during this time and helped cover up Rostenkowski’s improprieties. [248]  Wendy later served on the board of Enron, chairing that company’s Audit Committee when it went belly up in December 2001, leaving small shareholders and employees holding the bag.

Skolnick says BCCI has been resurrected as Pinnacle Banc Group, whose flagship is the First National Bank of Cicero.  Cicero is a suburb of Chicago and has earned the nickname Al Capone Land, owing to its long history of hosting organized crime families.  Bishop Paul Marcinkus, the former Vatican Bank executive who had ties to Robert Calvi’s Banco Ambrosiano takeover of Continental Illinois Bank, controls the First National Bank of Cicero.  Marcinkus is a long-time CIA liaison. [249]

BCCI was a principal bank for the GCC oil elite. No bank in the world ever grew faster.  When the Bank of England shut BCCI down $20 billion in assets were gone forever, most of it belonging to Third World governments and citizens.  A huge petrodollar slush fund had disappeared in a haze of covert operations, drug smuggling and IMF embezzlement of Third World governments.  Now the anger of the Arab street was shared by many GCC sheiks, who knew that after faithfully serving as CIA paymasters, they had been shaken down by the Bank of England Rothschild crowd.

It was not exactly what Egyptian nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser had envisioned when he called for a Bank of the South to be financed by OPEC oil revenues, with the money going to finance real development for the Third World poor.  Instead, the poor had been fleeced one more time and their anger was increasingly being aimed at the United States.

Dean Henderson is the author of five books:Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve, Stickin’ it to the Matrix & The Federal Reserve Cartel.  You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @www.hendersonlefthook.wordpress.com